At Mayse Automotive Group near Springfield, Missouri, two Chevy Spark EVs were recently spotted on the lot and on sale.

Though there’s been ample speculation over the Spark EV being sold at the nationwide level at some point in the future, we can assure you that General Motors’ stance at the moment is that the automaker has no intention of widening the availability of the Spark EV. Furthermore, these two Spark EVs are not new. Rather, both are GM exec ultra low-mileage lease turn ins. Basically, two upper-level GM employees got (likely free) use of theese Spark EVs for a limited amount of time. Hence why both vehicles have less than 1,000 miles on the odometer.

Regardless of the circumstances, these two Spark EVs prove that slowly, but surely GM’s little pure electric is trickling into dealerships outside of California and Oregon. However, getting one serviced, in say Missouri, might not be so easy as dealers will have zero-to-no real-life experience working on the Spark EV, so buyer beware.

While EVs do require less maintenance than ICEs as a whole, when they do have a problem you’d better hope that your dealer has a trained tech and the special equipment needed to diagnose and fix the problem. We live in a state (Colorado) that got the LEAF late, and an area of the state that has been slow to adopt the LEAF. When we first started getting service at the local dealer it was very evident that the LEAF service tech was still going through the teething stage on this new type of car. Basic stuff – like turning on Carwings that had not been enabled – took hours to work through. A problem like a bad heating coil took literally days to diagnose (although I pointed to MNL posts with the full diagnosis from LEAFs in California). Now, 18 months later, he’s worked on a lot of LEAFs and answers are quicker. Now, imagine I got a compliance EV shipped here and took it to a local dealer who had never seen one before. Even if we set aside the issue of Toyota not honoring warranty service outside of CA for the RAV4 EV, you still have the… Read more »

The assumption is you’ll be keeping the car longer than just a 1-2 years, in which case it makes sense to have at least some kind of DC charging on it (which can potentially be adapted to other standards using adapters).

I kind of expect GM to start selling this outside of CA. My reason for this line of thinking is the recent re-design of the battery pack and drive train. After all, if it were a compliance car only, why bother to spend the money to redesign it? If they were only planning to sell 2,000 units per year, it would have probably been cheaper just to stick with the design they already had.

I believe, it will be released nationwide once GM is confident in the reliability of the Spark EV and it gets near to the release of Voltec 2.0. The battery pack redesign of the spark foreshadows greater availability. I think that GM is using the knowledge it learned from the Spark EV fleet to develop training for nationwide dealerships. This is especially important for what appears to be a future commitment to Voltec 2.0 which many commenters have speculated may use a version of the Spark EV transaxle.

This is one part of the EVolution that I detest: Trying to read the minds of the people running car corporations. It’s like a throwback to the Cold War era “Kremlinologists” who would decipher every little sign about the Soviet Union, e.g. what does it mean that X intead of Y was standing next to Brezhnev while viewing a parade, etc.

There’s a lot to be frustrated about, not least of which being the way Honda and Toyota are dragging their feet, and we’re all very eager to see real progress. But it can’t be said too often: Car corporations are still, at heart, corporations that value profits above all else. And that often leads to short-term absurdities (e.g. Fiat and their “please don’t buy my EV” nonsense) even though everyone with more than three gray cells to rub together know where this whole thing is going, at least in general terms.

Your headline got me excited, only to be let down by the reality. This car needs to go nationwide its one of the very few bright ‘sparks’ in GMs stables not impacted by recent recalls. They need some good news and this could be it.

…Spark EVs are currently being sold – to the public – at several dealerships in Quebec. Not exactly sanctioned by GM, but if this site’s writers are interested in seeing these vehicles sold outside of compliance states, they may want to investigate this further.

I say this a lot, because it seems hope overpowers reality about EV compliance manufacturers. GM is not going “nationwide” with Spark EV sales; not today, and not in the coming years. Any cars sold in Missouri as a used car, or “under-the-table” sales in Quebec are not sanctioned by GM for new car sales. They will not get the required Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) credits they require for any new car sale / lease that is not registered in a compliance state. GM, along with all the following manufacturers for model year 2015 and beyond, BMW, Fiat/Chrysler, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Daimler/Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen must comply with the CARB-ZEV requirements. Four additional manufacturers would also be required to comply with the ZEV requirements, but would be allowed to meet their obligation with PHEVs. Those requirements extend beyond California for model year 2018 and beyond, when the “traveling provisions” expire that allow companies to only sell their ZEV in only California. So, what did they do? They petitioned to keep selling in only California, unsuccessfully. That means that those CARB-ZEV compliant companies must sell their ZEV’s in the following states by 2018 model year: CARB state coalition… Read more »